We study the willingness to compete against self and others in an experiment with over 650 participants, using a modified version of the Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) design. We show that introducing a possibility to self-compete, in addition to the standard other-compe”-tition option, increases the proportion of participants who compete by more than 60 percent, indi”-cating that self-competition attracts many of those who would otherwise have stayed out of com”-petitions altogether. This holds for both men and women. Moreover, men and women prefer self-competitions to other-competitions, especially when they have to select one of the two types of competitions. We also document that self-competitions are perceived as more controllable than other-competitions.